APPENDIX II - BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA

Summary

Geographically, as well as ethnologically and historically, Babylonia and Assyria form but one country. It is therefore with justice that classical writers sometimes speak of the whole district between the Euphrates and Tigris as Assyria, though Babylonia would no doubt have been a more accurate name. The district naturally falls into two divisions, the northern being more or less mountainous, while the southern is flat and marshy, and a sharp line of separation is drawn between them at a spot where the two rivers approach closely to one another, and the undulating table-land of the north sinks suddenly into the alluvial flats of Babylonia. It was in these rich and loamy flats, however, that the civilisation of Western Asia first developed. The northern plateau was inhabited by a mixture of uncultivated tribes at the earliest period of which we have any knowledge, and was known under the general name of Gutium or Guti (Kutu in Assyrian), first identified by Sir H. Rawlinson with the Goyim of Gen. xiv. 1. Gutium comprised the whole country which stretched from the Euphrates on the west to Media on the east; the land of Nizir, with the mountain of Rowandiz, on which the ark of the Chaldean Noah was believed to have rested, being included within it. The later kingdom of Assyria formed a portion of it, as well as the great plain of Mesopotamia, which was bounded on the west by Palestine or Martu, the land of “the path of the setting sun,” and on the north by Subarti, “the highlands” of Aram or Syria.